I've met a breed of career min-maxers adjacent to Julius that I have a hard time describing.
Picture this: you join a new team with a senior engineer, call him Pete. Pete wrote the initial version of a new product, and you joined the team to take over and continue it's development. Pete is bona fide genius who can work miracles and he is always in the critical path of each new initiative, you are told.
Once you open the lid of this new codebase you discover that this new product is a half baked spaghetti ball of mud that barely works as the demo that it was intended. With no documentation or tests, it takes you a while to even understand what's going on. Meanwhile the clock is ticking. It took Pete a mere 2 weeks to write this system, why it is taking you so long to add new features?
You try to explain to management the pickle you find yourself in, but to no avail. They fucking love Pete, and won't have anyone criticizing him. He has saved their asses in numerous occasions, and why is it always that others are the ones who can't keep up with him?
So you chug along, paying the price of the mess that Pete made while he keeps moving to even larger initiatives under leadership adoration. He also seems to have a knack to leave ship before his acts catch up with him, and when he decided to leave the job for a promotion and significant raise, management will miss him.
I've seen this behavior more than once and it seems too specific to not be intentional. Let me know if you ever met someone like Pete and how you call such people.
I do "computer stuff" as my profession for about 20 years and always for rather small companies. I do everything from wiring a network, any level of supported, programming and administrative stuff... oh yeah, and in my current job I sometimes drive a forklift in the warehouse.
I work now for about 10 years for the same company and have built significant parts of their software ecosystem, and in my professional opinion: Its a Rube Goldberg machine fixed and extended with duct-tape, hotglue and tons of wishful thinking. Nothing, absolutely nothing in the system I had to build was carefully planned, implemented or tested. Most new feature requests were handed in by an stressed out boss on a Friday afternoon telling me that we need feature X / solution for problem Y / bugfix Z ABSOLUTELY URGENTLY because something went terribly wrong. Its not uncommon that this visits were the result of some prior hotfix backfiring.
And I build it. And it works.
I have often told my boss that it would be best to drag the whole system behind the warehouse and shoot it to relief it of its misery... but, well, it works...
Perhaps I should work on having this 'Pete skill' of leaving ship for the raise and promotion thing ;-)
This is what John Osterhout calls a _tactical tornado_. It's a programmer who only develops tactically. I find his book, "A Philosophy of Software Design" provides a good vocabulary to think about the technical aspects of this. See Chapter 3: Working Code isn't Enough. It may be enough vocabulary to begin working on the problem without attacking the person.
As for the psychology of such people, I haven't found a single resource. Clearly the system they operate in provides a feedback loop that reinforces their behavior. I'm sure personality, as defined by the Big Five model, plays a part (e.g. orderliness).
That sounds like a management error, not a Pete problem.
If Pete was told to get a demo done as soon as possible, that's what he did.
And in many cases that's not a bad thing for management to tell people. Finding product market fit, usually trumps tech debt.
The thing is, that management should know, how time intensive and difficult it can be to turn a cobbled together demo into a production system.
In large companies I have seen a related pattern. Usually a mid-level engineer that the managers love because they "get stuff done".. meanwhile they are a bulldozer in the code, usually with some "ship-it" buddy green lighting the work.
The reason they can "move fast" is because everyone else is trying to limit complexity, etc. and they are punching holes through the abstractions.
Then turn into your "Pete" when they get promoted...
> He also seems to have a knack to leave ship before his acts catch up with him, and when he decided to leave the job for a promotion and significant raise, management will miss him.
This is not a "knack". It's a manipulative skill he has learned over time. A way to burnish his reputation at the expense of his peers. Petes suck.
We tend to underestimate management's visibility in such situations. I had three senior engineers. One was your Pete (names are not real of course), throw him anything and he'll have something half-working in no time. Ugly but enough function to be called a proof of concept. One was the opposite, call him Paul, give him any problem and he would spend his whole life if possible researching every minute detail of the problem, similar domains and patterns etc. The last one, Mary, was the master combiner. She could collect all kinds of information, abstract and deep as in Paul's, quirky, dirty or non-existent as in Peter's and make them into something deeply practical and down to earth. Can you see how one could manage the work between these 3, all with their teams, in a way that everyone felt respected and admired for their approach? Same with the Julius of the post. Management might be aware of Julius weaknesses, but Julius could still bring a unique delivery skill-set that is required in the context of the overall team's work.
I worked with someone like this at my first job out of college, he did build a lot before leaving the team. But what he left behind in our systems was a string of technical decisions that really hamstrung us, like building our core service around the API of an extremely inefficient protocol buffer library he wrote himself, resulting in a service that could only handle 4-5 QPS per node. One of our other services used an application specific enum that for some reason existed in its own separate RubyGem that he published, so in order to update it we had to update the gem and then change the dependency reference.
I'm quite scared of being this. I tick a lot of the boxes: I have a good rep for being fast and management likes me quite a bit. And I definitely have spearheaded things that I've since been pulled away from. I try to counter balance all that by writing docs and sticking around though. I do my best to help those who work on the stuff I was involved with.
The last telco I worked at had a project manager like this.
She would take on a dozen small-ish projects (~6 months / $1M), and just jam them through by buying some off the shelf managed solution and using an external contractor who would write spaghetti to run tentacles to everything. She would routinely deliver projects early and under budget, which made her a stand out STAR. No other projects in the entire company were remotely close - normal was double time and budget. Green ticks next to her name, promotions, bonuses, etc.
Once I was invited to a conference call with a dozen people I didn't really know.
Her: We've tapped you as the main support person for this new system we've just deployed into production as part of this new project. I has customers live now.
Me: OK, great. Where's the documentation (there is none). What server does it run on? (Huh?). What credentials do I use to login (what?). Who is managing this SSL certificate? (What?). And so on.
I was told later that was a Career Limiting Move (CLM) on my part, because I wasn't being a team player, and I was adding friction to The Greatest Project Manager(TM).
She did this for at least 50 projects, always getting accolades while creating an absolute shit-storm for support to deal with. As the years rolled on I learned this is perfectly normal for a telco.
It is a ying-yang kind of situation where you need people to do the greenfield stuff and just get something working and you also need people who balance that through documentation, rollout, and day 2 operations.
I am in a feedback loop of if what I built sucks I will get paged and woken up in the night, but that only includes operational health and not necessarily “good” architecture and documentation.
I will say that 9/10 times when I cut corners or do something which is hacky it is really only an aesthetics thing and does not affect metrics which matter. The best thing you can do is make things simple and hacky, it leads to quick MVP and is easy to refactor. Complex and hacky is where you get into all sorts of problems.
> I've seen this behavior more than once and it seems too specific to not be intentional.
I mean, why not, this sort of quick delivery is super valuable to companies. But management needs to understand that the solution is more like a prototype, difficult to scale (in features, team) and that's where it is the engineer's responsibility to be transparent.
I saw the end coming miles away, but enjoyed reading this essay anyway as it's well written. I guess I saw it coming in good part because I can really relate to the story, from the point of view of a CS associate professor.
LLMs are a real pain for students on so many levels. These tools can destroy their confidence by being seemingly better than them at first, which also makes these students want to use these tools instead of learning, and then it starts to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I kind of fear the impact this tech will have on our future. A society mostly full of Juliuses is doomed.
Perhaps I am becoming overly cynical as I approach middle age, but it seems to me that this phenomenon exists because the people who have the ultimate decision making powers in businesses are business people. Businesses exist to serve the egos and goals of the people who run them - from their perspective things like technical competence and honesty are often secondary to achieving business outcomes or impressing upper management (it is telling that these are somehow different things). Julius is clearly better at this than the sad programmers who merely know how to code.
I would dearly love to believe that an alternative is possible, but there seem to be powerful incentives pushing the world towards this scenario. For many of us the best we can hope for is a work place that is not too dysfunctional, that respects your personal boundaries while paying an ok salary. I count myself fortunate to work at such a place, while dreaming of other things.
The counter agreement often made is that if there was a better alternative to this then, like a company run by people who understand the fundamentals of what they actually make, then they would outcompete all these lazy bones, self-serving business people. My observation however has been that in fact many such companies have come, they have indeed dominated their competitors, only to later become infiltrated by the same business types they had once trounced.
It’s frustrating to simultaneously be able to perceive this and also do nothing about it. There are a lot of Juliuses out there. Still work doesn’t have to be one’s whole identity. If one happens to be there at the right place and at the right time then awesome. They probably got the experience of their lifetime. But if not then it’s ok! I think we can all do work that we’re proud of still, and it’s probably best to not get too worked up over this stuff. I don’t think Julius has that same option.
>the people who have the ultimate decision making powers in businesses are business people... I would dearly love to believe that an alternative is possible, but there seem to be powerful incentives pushing the world towards this scenario.
Love him or hate him, Elon Musk has done a pretty good job of demonstrating that the market can reward autistic technical leaders who piss everyone off.
Obviously Elon's character flaws are well-documented. I don't think anyone should venerate him. I'm just skeptical that conventional management practices are over-determined by incentives.
I have to say I became a lot happier in this field once I aligned myself more with Julius.
I think what happens to developers and engineers is that since we have the ability to attune our toolsets very specifically to our needs, we assume everyone can do the same.
This is untrue. Most people live a life of hodge-podge technical solutions that don’t work very well, meaning their expectations for how software should work is supremely low.
Once I understood this I became Julius. Management does not care how or why the software does or doesn’t work - they just want 12 rules for life style platitudes and charisma.
The part about sending Julius to meetings while everyone else worked to fix things particularly stood out. The meetings are useless, but that’s where everyone glad hands. Gladhanders get raises.
The difference is that I like to think I’m still pretty good and doing my job. I’m just acknowledging that pure l33t skills does not a career ladder make. If anything it could even be a hindrance.
> Management does not care how or why the software does or doesn’t work - they just want 12 rules for life style platitudes and charisma.
Which clearly shows that something is wrong in the industry, or how management roles are filled, or how wealth and influence and opportunities are distributed generally.
Really worth actually reading, very nicely done. I think the point is being made that real Julii exist, and also, that the mechanisms being used to get AI into workplaces and such are the same methods used by the Julii of the world to get ahead as well.
In the non-tech world they're called schmoozers. They were either former athletes, quick witted, good looking, well spoken and/or cockie. Everyone knew they were incompetent, but they seemed to always get away with it because they were likable.
When they were in over their head on a project, they were always assigned someone who could bail them out. Because of this they always increased the work load of others, thus they were loathed. What usually helped us was they would get promoted, then they became useful because then we could control the projects.
we hired a Julius. Result after a year: Prolific people were laid off, yappers stayed, sales didn't grow, more money was spent than made. Company has 6 month left of runway. Oh Julius why you be like that? Amazing presentations tho. Like watching a movie.
Julius sounds like repeated application of The Peter Principle except he never went past any level of competence because he was always incompetent. Polished but incompetent.
If this is going to enter our lexicon as a short-name for this type of person, I'll point out that since "Julius" is originally latin derived, the pluralization should follow that of most/all latin nouns, and thus be "Julii".
Well, yes. But the blog is an English blog and plural is Juliuses. The rules of grammar apply from the language, not from the word. Sometimes the language inherits the rules from the language of the word. But that's an exception.
This is not a comment about the main story in the article, but about a paragraph at the end:
"My boss came to see me. He told me that the team’s productivity was dangerously declining. That we should use artificial intelligence more effectively. That we risked being overtaken by competitors who, without a doubt, were using the very latest artificial intelligence."
This is the oldest scam in the book. A boss will never talk to you if there is any kind of problem with your productivity, they will fire you and that's it. Any boss talking about needing to work harder etc. is only trying to squeeze out some extra juice from workers who are already working perfectly fine.
But the author and his team seem to be willing victims of scammers and exploiters, so what else is to be expected?
If highly confident bullshit artistry is a desirable trait in any job description the parent org should abandon pretense and pivot to flogging crypto and dietary supplements.
There are two games in a career, a game of expertise and a game of status. Most people on this forum play the authority game, its in the name. But typically groups of humans only listen to an expert when the expert's ideas are propounded by a high status individual. And by status I don't mean class (in this group I assume I don't have to explain expertise) I mean presentation, appearance, biography, provenance.. Both things really matter with humans.
I've met some grossly incompetent colleagues that were kept in the team just because they were willing to do certain kind of work that we didn't like, but management only pretended to not notice.
As for AI being the new version of this, I don't think so. The effect of this tech is more likely to remove one layer in the hierarchy. But maybe it's your boss, not you, that will get replaced.
> I now have an artificial intelligence software that helps me code. Another that helps me search for information. A third one that summarises and writes my emails. I am not allowed to disable them
Wtf, are places actually making this nonsense mandatory now?!
Unpleasant assignment at a decidedly unethical firm, and frankly often-dodgy industry, my own stay was brief.
Technical masters from a top-tier university, had all the toys, flashy wheels, etc.
But stymied by the most elementary coding tasks.
"Julius" turned up in headlines a few years later charged (and subsequently convicted, sentenced, and incarcerated) for insider trading / securities fraud.
I can find links for the legal case, very little if anything online since.
My 10+ years professional life in software has seen me both thinking I am Julius and thinking I am working with Julii.
What I try to tell myself is that I am working in a state where I am at best ~75% sure of what I am doing. I assume others are in a similar situation with a varying percentage value.
Mistakes happen more often than I would like (not quite of the IP-less internet caliber, but still) and both when I make mistakes, and other make mistakes, I try to remind myself of this.
I value highly anyone that takes the time to tell me I made a mistake and why, I try to offer the same courtesy when I get the chance.
I only am worried when people _repeatedly_ make no attempt to learn from mistakes and just shrug them off, or worse leave the hot potato to someone else and still get the credit. But I can also see how sometimes we make mistakes and don't even realize.
...more on the topic, I guess, I have stopped using AI tools while coding almost completely
This is a nice parable, but in my experience, people who see their self-image reflected in this story can be just as difficult to work with. They often view themselves as smart and quietly capable, the unsung heroes keeping things running with little compensation and even less credit, while perceiving incompetence and unworthiness in everyone around them.
These individuals may think of themselves as “nice guys,” but their unwavering confidence in their own infallibility blinds them to the distinction between doing things wrong and doing things differently. They dismiss documentation, consensus building, and communication with non-technical colleagues as wastes of time—then wonder why their accomplishments go unrecognized or unappreciated.
> My boss came to see me. He told me that the team’s productivity was dangerously declining. That we should use artificial intelligence more effectively. That we risked being overtaken by competitors who, without a doubt, were using the very latest artificial intelligence.
I think this part is real. Developers who can use AI tooling to gain a multiple of productivity boost while still having the domain expertise to correct the parts that AI gets wrong will become much more desirable than ones who don’t.
But it’s not so much like the article states- AI is not itself the employee that managers love and their peers despise. The developer who can achieve extremely high and accurate velocity due to a combination of domain expertise and AI use will be the one that both managers and their peers love. And that organization will seek to hire more developers like that one.
Are you sure? I'm always assuming that the Julius's aren't self aware, they don't know that they are like that. If they know, then they aren't Julius, it would be impossible to act this way if you were aware of it, without being a psychopath.
Maybe that should be the discussion. Is Julius a psychopath, and that is what bubbles to the top of corporate hierarchies.
This sounds made up and actually written by an AI. "I now have an artificial intelligence software that helps me code", can't see anyone working in the field writing like that.
angarg12|1 year ago
Picture this: you join a new team with a senior engineer, call him Pete. Pete wrote the initial version of a new product, and you joined the team to take over and continue it's development. Pete is bona fide genius who can work miracles and he is always in the critical path of each new initiative, you are told.
Once you open the lid of this new codebase you discover that this new product is a half baked spaghetti ball of mud that barely works as the demo that it was intended. With no documentation or tests, it takes you a while to even understand what's going on. Meanwhile the clock is ticking. It took Pete a mere 2 weeks to write this system, why it is taking you so long to add new features?
You try to explain to management the pickle you find yourself in, but to no avail. They fucking love Pete, and won't have anyone criticizing him. He has saved their asses in numerous occasions, and why is it always that others are the ones who can't keep up with him?
So you chug along, paying the price of the mess that Pete made while he keeps moving to even larger initiatives under leadership adoration. He also seems to have a knack to leave ship before his acts catch up with him, and when he decided to leave the job for a promotion and significant raise, management will miss him.
I've seen this behavior more than once and it seems too specific to not be intentional. Let me know if you ever met someone like Pete and how you call such people.
RalfWausE|1 year ago
I do "computer stuff" as my profession for about 20 years and always for rather small companies. I do everything from wiring a network, any level of supported, programming and administrative stuff... oh yeah, and in my current job I sometimes drive a forklift in the warehouse.
I work now for about 10 years for the same company and have built significant parts of their software ecosystem, and in my professional opinion: Its a Rube Goldberg machine fixed and extended with duct-tape, hotglue and tons of wishful thinking. Nothing, absolutely nothing in the system I had to build was carefully planned, implemented or tested. Most new feature requests were handed in by an stressed out boss on a Friday afternoon telling me that we need feature X / solution for problem Y / bugfix Z ABSOLUTELY URGENTLY because something went terribly wrong. Its not uncommon that this visits were the result of some prior hotfix backfiring.
And I build it. And it works.
I have often told my boss that it would be best to drag the whole system behind the warehouse and shoot it to relief it of its misery... but, well, it works...
Perhaps I should work on having this 'Pete skill' of leaving ship for the raise and promotion thing ;-)
spit2wind|1 year ago
As for the psychology of such people, I haven't found a single resource. Clearly the system they operate in provides a feedback loop that reinforces their behavior. I'm sure personality, as defined by the Big Five model, plays a part (e.g. orderliness).
YmiYugy|1 year ago
XenophileJKO|1 year ago
The reason they can "move fast" is because everyone else is trying to limit complexity, etc. and they are punching holes through the abstractions.
Then turn into your "Pete" when they get promoted...
kelnos|1 year ago
This is not a "knack". It's a manipulative skill he has learned over time. A way to burnish his reputation at the expense of his peers. Petes suck.
cgio|1 year ago
tdeck|1 year ago
resonious|1 year ago
_dp9d|1 year ago
She would take on a dozen small-ish projects (~6 months / $1M), and just jam them through by buying some off the shelf managed solution and using an external contractor who would write spaghetti to run tentacles to everything. She would routinely deliver projects early and under budget, which made her a stand out STAR. No other projects in the entire company were remotely close - normal was double time and budget. Green ticks next to her name, promotions, bonuses, etc.
Once I was invited to a conference call with a dozen people I didn't really know.
Her: We've tapped you as the main support person for this new system we've just deployed into production as part of this new project. I has customers live now.
Me: OK, great. Where's the documentation (there is none). What server does it run on? (Huh?). What credentials do I use to login (what?). Who is managing this SSL certificate? (What?). And so on.
I was told later that was a Career Limiting Move (CLM) on my part, because I wasn't being a team player, and I was adding friction to The Greatest Project Manager(TM).
She did this for at least 50 projects, always getting accolades while creating an absolute shit-storm for support to deal with. As the years rolled on I learned this is perfectly normal for a telco.
miksak|1 year ago
MortyWaves|1 year ago
__turbobrew__|1 year ago
It is a ying-yang kind of situation where you need people to do the greenfield stuff and just get something working and you also need people who balance that through documentation, rollout, and day 2 operations.
I am in a feedback loop of if what I built sucks I will get paged and woken up in the night, but that only includes operational health and not necessarily “good” architecture and documentation.
I will say that 9/10 times when I cut corners or do something which is hacky it is really only an aesthetics thing and does not affect metrics which matter. The best thing you can do is make things simple and hacky, it leads to quick MVP and is easy to refactor. Complex and hacky is where you get into all sorts of problems.
The_Colonel|1 year ago
I mean, why not, this sort of quick delivery is super valuable to companies. But management needs to understand that the solution is more like a prototype, difficult to scale (in features, team) and that's where it is the engineer's responsibility to be transparent.
p4bl0|1 year ago
LLMs are a real pain for students on so many levels. These tools can destroy their confidence by being seemingly better than them at first, which also makes these students want to use these tools instead of learning, and then it starts to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I kind of fear the impact this tech will have on our future. A society mostly full of Juliuses is doomed.
ocschwar|1 year ago
spopejoy|1 year ago
awanderingmind|1 year ago
Perhaps I am becoming overly cynical as I approach middle age, but it seems to me that this phenomenon exists because the people who have the ultimate decision making powers in businesses are business people. Businesses exist to serve the egos and goals of the people who run them - from their perspective things like technical competence and honesty are often secondary to achieving business outcomes or impressing upper management (it is telling that these are somehow different things). Julius is clearly better at this than the sad programmers who merely know how to code.
I would dearly love to believe that an alternative is possible, but there seem to be powerful incentives pushing the world towards this scenario. For many of us the best we can hope for is a work place that is not too dysfunctional, that respects your personal boundaries while paying an ok salary. I count myself fortunate to work at such a place, while dreaming of other things.
asimpletune|1 year ago
It’s frustrating to simultaneously be able to perceive this and also do nothing about it. There are a lot of Juliuses out there. Still work doesn’t have to be one’s whole identity. If one happens to be there at the right place and at the right time then awesome. They probably got the experience of their lifetime. But if not then it’s ok! I think we can all do work that we’re proud of still, and it’s probably best to not get too worked up over this stuff. I don’t think Julius has that same option.
0xDEAFBEAD|1 year ago
Love him or hate him, Elon Musk has done a pretty good job of demonstrating that the market can reward autistic technical leaders who piss everyone off.
Recent viral video of Andrej Karpathy describing Elon's management style: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSiJ4YTKxfM
Obviously Elon's character flaws are well-documented. I don't think anyone should venerate him. I'm just skeptical that conventional management practices are over-determined by incentives.
hklijlyh|1 year ago
[deleted]
ChilledTonic|1 year ago
I think what happens to developers and engineers is that since we have the ability to attune our toolsets very specifically to our needs, we assume everyone can do the same.
This is untrue. Most people live a life of hodge-podge technical solutions that don’t work very well, meaning their expectations for how software should work is supremely low.
Once I understood this I became Julius. Management does not care how or why the software does or doesn’t work - they just want 12 rules for life style platitudes and charisma.
The part about sending Julius to meetings while everyone else worked to fix things particularly stood out. The meetings are useless, but that’s where everyone glad hands. Gladhanders get raises.
The difference is that I like to think I’m still pretty good and doing my job. I’m just acknowledging that pure l33t skills does not a career ladder make. If anything it could even be a hindrance.
Perhaps this is a cynical response.
epicureanideal|1 year ago
Which clearly shows that something is wrong in the industry, or how management roles are filled, or how wealth and influence and opportunities are distributed generally.
sourcepluck|1 year ago
spudlyo|1 year ago
pjbk|1 year ago
bloomingeek|1 year ago
When they were in over their head on a project, they were always assigned someone who could bail them out. Because of this they always increased the work load of others, thus they were loathed. What usually helped us was they would get promoted, then they became useful because then we could control the projects.
bytesandbits|1 year ago
Dansvidania|1 year ago
hklijlyh|1 year ago
[deleted]
dgeiser13|1 year ago
thrance|1 year ago
I've met my fair share of Juliuses, both in college and in work. It often really made me question why I even care about what I do.
buggy6257|1 year ago
whatisyourwork|1 year ago
dredmorbius|1 year ago
spondylosaurus|1 year ago
tmtvl|1 year ago
tgv|1 year ago
carlosjobim|1 year ago
"My boss came to see me. He told me that the team’s productivity was dangerously declining. That we should use artificial intelligence more effectively. That we risked being overtaken by competitors who, without a doubt, were using the very latest artificial intelligence."
This is the oldest scam in the book. A boss will never talk to you if there is any kind of problem with your productivity, they will fire you and that's it. Any boss talking about needing to work harder etc. is only trying to squeeze out some extra juice from workers who are already working perfectly fine.
But the author and his team seem to be willing victims of scammers and exploiters, so what else is to be expected?
johnorourke|1 year ago
I feel sorry for you having experienced that culture... this is not normal behaviour for good companies, and they do exist.
prmoustache|1 year ago
This is just a fictional story meant to be an allegory about AI. I don't understand why people takes it so literally in the comments.
bnetd|1 year ago
[deleted]
oddly|1 year ago
electric_mayhem|1 year ago
…missing the twist.
So as a TLDR, I’ll say that Julius is a peer of the author who is polished but uncomprehending, often spouting convincing-sounding nonsense.
And here in 2024 we not only have folks like that to contend with, but also have polished AI output being forced at us from every direction.
What a world we have ahead of us with Internet-scale automated uncomprehending nonsense
karmakurtisaani|1 year ago
forgetfreeman|1 year ago
jjulius|1 year ago
inglor_cz|1 year ago
jpfr|1 year ago
dctoedt|1 year ago
nis0s|1 year ago
mandmandam|1 year ago
georgeecollins|1 year ago
narag|1 year ago
As for AI being the new version of this, I don't think so. The effect of this tech is more likely to remove one layer in the hierarchy. But maybe it's your boss, not you, that will get replaced.
rsynnott|1 year ago
Wtf, are places actually making this nonsense mandatory now?!
bnetd|1 year ago
[deleted]
jollyllama|1 year ago
bradleyy|1 year ago
dredmorbius|1 year ago
Unpleasant assignment at a decidedly unethical firm, and frankly often-dodgy industry, my own stay was brief.
Technical masters from a top-tier university, had all the toys, flashy wheels, etc.
But stymied by the most elementary coding tasks.
"Julius" turned up in headlines a few years later charged (and subsequently convicted, sentenced, and incarcerated) for insider trading / securities fraud.
I can find links for the legal case, very little if anything online since.
Dansvidania|1 year ago
What I try to tell myself is that I am working in a state where I am at best ~75% sure of what I am doing. I assume others are in a similar situation with a varying percentage value.
Mistakes happen more often than I would like (not quite of the IP-less internet caliber, but still) and both when I make mistakes, and other make mistakes, I try to remind myself of this.
I value highly anyone that takes the time to tell me I made a mistake and why, I try to offer the same courtesy when I get the chance.
I only am worried when people _repeatedly_ make no attempt to learn from mistakes and just shrug them off, or worse leave the hot potato to someone else and still get the credit. But I can also see how sometimes we make mistakes and don't even realize.
...more on the topic, I guess, I have stopped using AI tools while coding almost completely
tqi|1 year ago
These individuals may think of themselves as “nice guys,” but their unwavering confidence in their own infallibility blinds them to the distinction between doing things wrong and doing things differently. They dismiss documentation, consensus building, and communication with non-technical colleagues as wastes of time—then wonder why their accomplishments go unrecognized or unappreciated.
caleblloyd|1 year ago
I think this part is real. Developers who can use AI tooling to gain a multiple of productivity boost while still having the domain expertise to correct the parts that AI gets wrong will become much more desirable than ones who don’t.
But it’s not so much like the article states- AI is not itself the employee that managers love and their peers despise. The developer who can achieve extremely high and accurate velocity due to a combination of domain expertise and AI use will be the one that both managers and their peers love. And that organization will seek to hire more developers like that one.
fakedang|1 year ago
FrustratedMonky|1 year ago
Maybe that should be the discussion. Is Julius a psychopath, and that is what bubbles to the top of corporate hierarchies.
Jackosas|1 year ago
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unknown|1 year ago
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sfjailbird|1 year ago
laurent_du|1 year ago
dsr_|1 year ago